Returning from a lecture tour in the United States, the Irish writer Shaw Desmond offered advice in London’s Evening Standard to other writers considering a visit to America. “If you want the most exclusive audience of all,” he wrote, “you will have to go to Boston.” The Midwest, he said, was “the home of soft sentiment and pink-eyed Puritanism,” but foreign lecturers should expect to meet, at Vassar and Wellesley, “some of the most adorable girls in the world,” who would make “a great fuss” over their visitors, while providing a critical, intelligent audience. The New York Times